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On Dental Hygiene and Magical Girls
Magical girls are notoriously disorganized in the morning, meaning that they frequently have to run to school while still eating breakfast. It's charming, but what then becomes of their daily dental routine? A brief study reveals that in the very first episode of Sailor Moon Usagi does indeed brush her teeth, which is reassuring:
On this occasion she is so late that she appears to skip breakfast altogether. However, by Episode 3 she has taken up the habit of running out of the house with food:
Tut tut. Cardcaptor Sakura, meanwhile, brushes her teeth and then sits down to a hearty breakfast provided by her father:
It's a very similar story with Madoka. First she brushes, then she breakfasts with her family:
This allows her to leave in a hurry with a tell-tale slice of toast dangling from her mouth:
When the cultural context is sufficiently distant it can be hard to tell a topos from real life. Are Japanese kitchens quite as heavily populated by benign aproned fathers as one might imagine from this small sample? I don't suppose so, but still - perhaps in Japan (or at least amongst the magical girls of that nation) it really is usual to brush one's teeth before breakfast. Might this be so? It seems dubious from the point of view of dental health, and the only person I ever knew to advocate it was my old German teacher, Mr Bachmann. His argument, circa 1974, was that waiting till after breakfast before brushing was unhealthy because it meant that you swallowed all the germs that had built up in your mouth overnight - an idea that failed to convince me at the time but struck me hard enough that I've remembered it for forty years. So, perhaps in Germany, Japan and elsewhere it is normal practice.
Maybe I'm the outlier here, in fact? Do let me know.
[Poll #1974494]
On this occasion she is so late that she appears to skip breakfast altogether. However, by Episode 3 she has taken up the habit of running out of the house with food:
Tut tut. Cardcaptor Sakura, meanwhile, brushes her teeth and then sits down to a hearty breakfast provided by her father:
It's a very similar story with Madoka. First she brushes, then she breakfasts with her family:
This allows her to leave in a hurry with a tell-tale slice of toast dangling from her mouth:
When the cultural context is sufficiently distant it can be hard to tell a topos from real life. Are Japanese kitchens quite as heavily populated by benign aproned fathers as one might imagine from this small sample? I don't suppose so, but still - perhaps in Japan (or at least amongst the magical girls of that nation) it really is usual to brush one's teeth before breakfast. Might this be so? It seems dubious from the point of view of dental health, and the only person I ever knew to advocate it was my old German teacher, Mr Bachmann. His argument, circa 1974, was that waiting till after breakfast before brushing was unhealthy because it meant that you swallowed all the germs that had built up in your mouth overnight - an idea that failed to convince me at the time but struck me hard enough that I've remembered it for forty years. So, perhaps in Germany, Japan and elsewhere it is normal practice.
Maybe I'm the outlier here, in fact? Do let me know.
[Poll #1974494]
Glad Madoka's in there :)
Hygiene-wise, why would there be a particular need to brush after breakfast if there's no particular need to brush after other meals? If it's to clean out what happened overnight, wouldn't brushing before breakfast do the trick?
To omit her would be sacrilege!
Such is not the case for our tardy Magical Girls, of course.
Hygiene-wise, why would there be a particular need to brush after breakfast if there's no particular need to brush after other meals?
A very good question, and one that has sometimes haunted me in the stilly watches. I suppose there is ultimately a trade-off between cleanliness and the gradual abrasion of tooth enamel - but there's a lot to be said for chewing some sugar-free gum after every meal, at least. Sadly, I have never seen a magical girl take this simple dental precaution.
Re: Glad Madoka's in there :)
Re: Glad Madoka's in there :)
I am addicted to marmite, which I spread on my bread at breakfast, but the taste is so strong that I feel filthy unless I clean it out of my mouth fairly soon afterwards.
I never saw the point of cleaning teeth as soon as I get up, as I couldn't see there'd be very much change from when I cleaned them just before going to bed. But I didn't have a German teacher to tell me about germs building up in my sleep.
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Janni, OTOH, brushes before eating. I cannot understand this. (It possibly helps that she rarely touches the sorts of food that interact badly to the toothpaste aftertaste. But still -- if brush at all, it should be AFTER the food.)
---L.
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It seems so to me too, but I'm learning that the world is a very various place in these matters.
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I eat breakfast every morning, but I only brush, floss, and mouth-wash in the evening before bed. But I am pretty rigorous about doing so.
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Thank you. There are many more Magical Girls series out there that I haven't even watched yet: ultimately I may have something large enough to distribute to dentists' waiting rooms.
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But on non-work days, if I'm not in a rush to leave the house, I eat breakfast first.
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I have spent much of my life really not hungry in the morning and therefore have never found breakfast particularly compulsory on a physical level. Last year I developed health problems for which I was told one palliative measure was to make sure I eat before 10 AM every day, so I have managed to get in the habit of doing it on work days and feel hungrier in the mornings now than I used to, but prior to that experience I didn't notice any immediate bad effects of not eating breakfast.
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I say, after breakfast is the most logical time to me but if I have to leave the house before or without breakfast, I´d always do it as part of normal morning routine before leaving home.
In Sweden where I grew up, tooth and other personal hygiene is (or at least was, when I was small) normally good, taught and supported at school with regular flour givings in class, information etc. so I still have medically perfect teeth at my age (also due to the homemade nourishment of my mum but that was unusual in 1960s Sweden) and like to brush my teeth after each meal, if possible. I often have a small portable brush in my bag, because it´s so pleasant to have clean teeth, it can easily be done anywhere. I try and advocate this toward the kids...
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we were (all) white allover not just our teeth (am not blushing at all, I adore my typoes, I regard them as my personal tags http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6z9LrwidsE)!
And no,
it was more of a red fluor(ite) liquid in a small plastic glass one had to gulp down (I´m a big fan of gulping down small plastic glasses, too), a classmate even got brownish flecks on her teeth from too much fluor givings, this can happen and looks interestingly much like freckles. That book seems like the real thing when it comes to flour givings, though!
oral health care